Asia-Pacific Power List 2024: Yajuan Wang, Red

SEE THE FULL 2024 POWER LIST Asia-Pacific’s 50 most influential and purposeful marketers #AuthenticLeaders

Yajuan Wang (Zhiheng) 

Chief marketing officer
Red (Xiaohongshu)
China
Returning member  

For Red, also known as Xiaohongshu and Little Red Book, 2023 marks its tenth anniversary. The app has evolved from being an online user-generated content (UGC) shopping guide app primarily targeting female consumers to becoming one of the most promising social media and influencer marketing platforms in China.

Red’s ten-year anniversary last year was a huge success as many fans of the brand participated in ‘city walks’ organised by the company. ‘City walks’, a term coined by Red, refers to the exploration of urban areas and has been a lifestyle habit among Gen Zs in China. Leveraging the popularity of ‘city walks’, Zhiheng and her team pioneered a new channel for influencer marketing competitions on the app, specifically for tourism content related to outdoor travelling.

Meanwhile, in a bold move in 2023, Red decided to shut down its official online shopping channel, Fulishe (or Benefits Club), which marked a shift from a direct B2C business model to one that provides increasing opportunities for both brands and influencers. Zhiheng and her team have been instrumental in developing a robust B2B ecommerce foundation over the past few years. Their efforts have earned the platform industry recognition and boosted direct sales for brands entering the marketplace, achieving Red’s transition from an online shopping guide to an emerging ecommerce platform. 

In 2023, the platform implemented a series of crucial measures to facilitate seamless integration between content creation and ecommerce, connecting its notes directly to products and linking KOC/KOL live streaming to products from the brand’s flagship stores on the platform. This transformation broke barriers between influencing and conversion to effectively turn content creators into entrepreneurs. 

Speaking at the 2024 WILL Commercial Conference, Red’s annual assembly for brands and marketers, Zhiheng said that commercialisation has been in rapid progress over the past year. Community-bonding and influencing on the platform has been summarised as human-to-human marketing, an approach taken by Zhiheng in addition to traditional brand advertising and performance marketing.

Her insights were in line with research findings from both Ebiquity and Totem Media, suggesting that brands in China are likely to increase their investments in platforms like Red and Douyin in the near future, a strategy which is referred to as the ‘excitement-to-commerce’ business model.

Before joining Red in 2020 as CMO and leading its commercialisation business, Zhiheng served as senior vice president and head of commercial advertising at Sina Weibo.

SEE THE FULL 2024 POWER LIST Asia-Pacific’s 50 most influential and purposeful marketers #AuthenticLeaders